Boole Seeks Peaceful Co-existence

Software Magazine, Oct, 1998 by Patrick Porter

Do you believe in systems and network management frameworks, end-to-end suites, or best-of-breed point products? It's the fundamental religious issue facing every enterprise network manager. But do you really have to choose? Saverio Merlo, senior vice president of marketing for Boole & Babbage Inc., believes many customers can have it both ways--framework/suites like TME 10 from Tivoli or Unicenter TNG from Computer Associates, and point products like B&B's Command/Post for best-of-breed availability and service level management.

The marketing of suites and frameworks reached such a fever pitch during the past year that even Merlo confesses to being worried at one point whether or not there would still be room for point-solution vendors. "But we are less worried now," says Merlo. "It's actually accelerating opportunities for us."

"About 20 percent of enterprise management customers buy religiously, without testing the solution," he says. "We don't compete with CA or Tivoli there. But 80 percent of customers do test and reference, and we win lots of those."

Even so, Boole & Babbage must co-exist with the framework vendors. To that end, the company recently announced a deeper level of integration with the Tivoli TME 10 and HP OpenView frameworks. The new connectivity products -- connect TEC, connect IT/Operations, and connect NNM -- enable customers to extend the reach of their frameworks with customized Command/Post business process views. The company is also working to integrate Command/Post with the Unicenter TNG Framework that was announced by CA last year.

Boole & Babbage is also promoting the concept of "desired state management," which Merlo describes as "the next higher piece of service-level management." Says Merlo, "It enables proactive management of service levels based on business policies. The idea is to link business policies and IT."

Other initiatives include availability agents for Microsoft Transaction Server and IBM's MQSeries. "We will see more and more agents in middleware and for uses like disk storage management," predicts Merlo. Indeed, NT promises to occupy a lot of B&B's attention in the coming year, beginning with its newly released Command/Post Explorer, to manage service levels of the often balky NT platform.